


Glass

by Zebooboo



Series: VoG Boys Week 2020 [2]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Becoming Undone, Grief/Mourning, Guardians Bending Reality, M/M, Multi, Vex Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:07:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23755090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zebooboo/pseuds/Zebooboo
Summary: Soon, soon there won't be enough of himself to call Kabr.For VoG Week 2020
Relationships: Kabr/Pahanin/Praedyth (Destiny)
Series: VoG Boys Week 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1709875
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17
Collections: Works about the Vault of Glass Fireteam





	Glass

**Author's Note:**

> I think I tore a bit of my heart out writing this one.  
> Enjoy <3

It pings like glass, breaks like glass, reflects like glass. But it’s not glass and Kabr wants to grind it to dust beneath his boot, if he still had form enough to walk in the Vault. Instead he’s just a spectre, looking from the inside out. Just a ghost in the system.  
  
‘ _Pahanin would have got a kick out of that_.’ He thinks and feels the phantom feeling of his non-existent throat close around tears.  
  
Instead he rifles through visual feeds, jumping from a hobgoblin kneeling in front of the pyramid of the Vault, to a Minotaur patrolling the sandy wastes of Mercury, to a Goblin slipping on a wet leaf in the Garden, to a Harpy dying to the gunfire of a strike team on Io.  
  
Distraction doesn’t suit him.  
  
He whirls back to the Vault, its dark halls and crumbling overhangs and all the pain and grief and Light he’s poured into its crevices. He watches his broken body, repaired and broken again and remade and so beyond recognition he’s surprised he can even single it out anymore from the sea of bronze.

When it had still been early _(Early? On whose definition of early? His? The Vex’s? Did it even matter?)_ he’d tried taking it back, ramming his mind against it again and again to try and pull out something. Light, volition out of the pieces of him still left inside, anything.  
  
He hasn’t tried again since it started singing in the Black Garden.

Now he wanders the network of the Vault, looking out but never jumping on a different net. The Vex never pay him any attention, he slides along their awareness but they never interact, maybe because they think he is part of them and so cannot harm them, or he is so insignificant that he bears no consideration, it matters little. He can’t touch any of them.  
  
He still finds new sectors every time he goes diving, seeking and searching for another distraction. _(Another and another and anotherand anotherandanotherandano-)_  
  
Kabr shakes his head, pulls his remnants closer to him, there’s not a lot of him left. He’s got to keep it safe. He goes exploring anyway.

There.

A flash, another facet of the cut glass reflecting him. Him and Praedyth and Pahanin, walking inside. Cocky and self-assured and so ready to return a few hours later and meet Eriana and Wei and Omar and Sai, fool around, have drinks, jump into the Crucible to crush some heads.

He blinks, looks away when the idea of what could have been almost took shape on the reflection. He moves on.  
  
Here.  
  
A glimmer of hope, Pahanin crashing out of a Hive infested cave with Caliban-8 on the damaged Sparrow’s helm and Pahanin wrapped around the exo so he won’t fall off and shooting manically at the Thralls still chasing them.

He wants to touch the grooves in Pahanin’s face from the ugly grimace of pain and disgust. He remembers this one. Pahanin had gone alone with Caliban in the middle of the night, hadn’t said anything to either him or Praedyth.

Caliban had still been hurting after Tallulah, had been a proper Hunter and not much of a Vanguard, chasing after the shadows of dragons beyond Jupiter, as far out as he could get. Praedyth had never liked it when Pahanin indulged him. Kabr had pitied Caliban, but never trusted him.

He twists away from the image. There’s nothing to look at here but loss.

Further down, hidden under layers of notations etched into the glass that snapped into shapes outside of his own dimension, Kabr found more.

Pahanin, again. Tired and face drawn with dark shadows under his eyes. He looks nothing like what Kabr can remember, nothing like what a focused effort could bring up from the _set-in-stone_ of his past. Not this pale imitation of a _presentthatisshaping // futureprobablitiesrollinglikeariver-_  
  
He gets lost in the rushing futures too long to catch back to the reflection, he tries to swim away but gets swept into the sea of cutting edges of the Vault. It’s a storm of every point in time the Vex can access, a disorganised dump of all the data Vex don’t need anymore. Overlapping and interchangeable, infinite and forever out of his reach. It beats against him relentlessly in a way the network never does. This is only the discards.

When Kabr washes back to a shore, he’s gasping for air that doesn’t exist. His existence is just marginally less.

There he weeps. As much as he can afford without losing his latch into the edges of the operational network.

He weeps like the grief of losing everything is still new. And it is, the fall happened ten seconds ago and a hundred decades ago, the memory of catching Pahanin around the neck and tossing him out of the portal and seeing Praedyth fall into an unfathomable abyss as worn as the smooth, leather grip of his gun and as raw as his screams still ripping out of his throat.

Kabr has little strength to move after the grief. It will come again, it always comes and will continue to come. It’s part of him now.

He hovers in and out of consciousness, hazy and broken and is there enough of him left to keep wandering? Is he out of distractions? Is his mortality finally catching up to him?

A sob breaks out.  
  
It’s not his.

Kabr looks out to the network of flickering glass and stone and follows the etches of the sound. It’s solid, like nothing else is in here and it snaps a trace of clarity in him like standing in front of his Commander used to do.

He puts his being into the etches, slithers into them like liquid. _(Like Vex, but this is faster, this is different, this is_ **_important_** _)._

There’s a wall. Glass. Glass, glass, _glass,_ **_always glass, but he can see through._ **

It’s a forgotten emotion that wells up as he looks at Praedyth. Alive. Here. Now.  
  
Not a watery reflection or a pale imitation and not a painful memory. He is withered and skeletal, hair grown to the point where Kabr cannot see the end to it and nails broken to their roots, but it’s undeniably _Praedyth._  
  
And he is crying and Kabr breaks into pieces.

A piece of love drips, viscous like honey. 

A piece of grief slides, watery thin and weak. 

A piece of loss gushes, trapped pressure. 

A piece of resolution pours, steady and slow. 

A piece of relief clogs them all up and he coagulates back together. 

He wants. 

A touch of the hair, a bump of their knuckles, a press of the lips. 

A sob breaks out. 

It's his. 

Praedyth's eyes look around but cannot see him and Kabr shouts and beats against the glass. 

_I will reach you,_ he screams. Praedyth closes his eyes. 

The Vex turn to him, then they carry on without a second thought. 

Kabr keeps vigil, pressed against the glass. Watches Praedyth fiddle with his helmet, his gloves, his gun. He sees the radio, hears the nightmares and the visions Praedyth sees. 

He sees the crude radio his Warlock makes and hope sparks in his chest. _Praedyth can make it._

He wanders only close by, or as close by as the network makes him believe to be. He always returns to Praedyth. _(He always will return. He's never away. He misses Pahanin terribly now. Even worse than before. Even worse than ever before.)_

He is there when Maya Sundaresh first speaks to Praedyth. He ripples with excitement and jealousy. 

He almost wishes he could speak and be heard, but he knows better than most the weight of those words. Even here. 

Instead he listens and when there's nothing to listen to, he follows the leak. Praedyth is sending signals and messages out of the Vault. But it's only one way. He finds the leak and digs at it. He loses a bit of him every time he sinks fingers in and the leak widens. 

Soon there's not enough of him left to regret it. 

He is finally small enough to read into the fine engravings of design that Praedyth and the scientist groups have slipped into the Vault's foundation. 

**_(Somewhere a door is always opening. Somewhere, they are always stepping through._** )

It looks so beautiful he inks himself into it. Sinks into the very intent of that notion. 

And when Praedyth walks out, there will always be a piece of Kabr leaving with him.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thank you Gil for setting this little community event up <3  
> Go thank Gileonnen!


End file.
